last night we went to see the new miyazaki film, howl’s moving castle instead of going to the black and white ball, which apparently everyone and their mother did instead. which was just as well, as i hear later that it ended up being a lot of really rich people watching the violent femmes and vomiting a lot. a lot. i’ve got stories of people having to clean rich people vomit off of AV cables and thick carpets drenched with upchuck.
granted, there was upchuck-like substances in howl, but it was much cooler in the form of nebulous evil beings and physical manifestations of depression and malaise. of course, the movie was beautiful to watch, and it had a great story. sadly, we were forced to watch the dubbed version and not the subtitled one as advertised. this is what you get when you are too stupid to buy tickets for the premiere at the ghibli festival at the PFA, where they were playing the subtitled version.
the interesting thing that hmc and i remarked upon was that the conflict in miyazaki movies is never depicted as simply black or white, in that the antagonist is never simply and truely just “evil”. instead he lets you see their motivations, and understand that there’s a reason for them doing whatever it is they’re doing, even though it may be against what the protagonist wants. you wind up with marvelous illustrations of shades of grey.
obviously, for government officials, there’s nothing to see here. please move along.
Posted at June 12, 2005 2:19 PMComments are now closed for this entry. Thank you for playing.